From: "Andrew Brown" <Andrew-AT-lubs.leeds.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 12:56:27 +0100
Subject: Re: BHA: Identity


many thanks, Mervyn.

Time just to focus your interpretation of me....

> a) We grasp in thought, in the TD,  the objective intelligibility of
> the object. I don't understand why the emergence of mind with its
> powers of thought should be a problem for this - it is rather, as I
> think Jamie has suggested, a necessary condition of its possibility!
> Science of course proceeds on the assumption that the world is so
> intelligible, and successfully. I think Andy sees it as a problem
> because he's conflating mind and its powers with their exercise in
> thought/ consciousness. Since mind is emergent (though by no means
> sheerly other) no-one is claiming that it is identical to other strata
> (this seems to me a red herring)  only that in grasping in thought the
> objective intelligibility of the object, we really do apprehend
> (aspects of) its inner structure.

My point is, and remains, that this 'grasping' cannot be couched in 
terms of identity without appearing to contradict SEPM and CR / 
DCR more generally. At no stage (in this thread) have I denied the 
possiblity of 'grasping' reality, just have kept pointing out obvious 
problems with the view that this entails 'identity'. This clearly has 
nothing to do with conflation of mind and thought. [In fact we had a 
conversation some years ago which has helped me to avoid this 
very conflation].

 Jamie is surely right too that SEPM
> does not delineate or put limits on the powers of mind.

I replied to this point. In brief, SEPM does say something about 
mind and object. If it didn't it would not be saying anything at all. It 
certainly couldn't rule out the host of positions on the mind-body 
problem that it is intended to rule out. It has an 'e' in it which 
means it is tied to the whole theory of 'emergence'.

 (Whether this
> meets all relevant philosophical critieria for identity I don't know.
> A sentence or a mathematical formula is clearly not identical to or
> even like the form it seeks to capture, yet there is a sense it seems
> to me in which it enables us tograsp the structure of the object, or
> we would indeed be like (blind) owls without wings.)

Again: why conflate 'grapsing' with 'identity'?

> 
> b) By a valid perspectival switch which locates everything in the ID
> (so that epistemology is a distinction within ontology) 

Is this what 'constellational identity' is getting at?

we see that a)
> is possible because *we* are an emergent *part of* the world and its
> fields of possibility. This is where the Hegel-derived docrtine of
> co-presence comes in, together with Platonic anamnesis, an implicate
> order, etc. Doubtless there are philosophical problems with all this,
> some indicated by Jamie, but I think we should take a hard look at
> what the philosophy of meta-Reality has to offer here because CR has
> never explained at all satisfactorily how it is we do get across the
> TD/ID 'divide'. (Of course, there are strands of thought within CR
> that hold that we don't - we only get to know theoretical objects -
> but that doesn't seem very satisfactory either.)

This is very interesting. Just maybe it relates to my banging on and 
on about identity vs. 'grasping'. I don't know. So I would be very 
grateful if you could elaborate.

> 
> 3. Re 'materialism' and 'consciousness', realism and
> 'mind-independence' etc.  You must remember that the ontology is one
> of possibility. Qua possibility, consciousness is implicit in the
> world. If there was a big bang, consciousness must have been implicit
> in the exploding particles. Is that not so? Such a view still leaves
> plenty of room for non-identity and emergence. I don't see that the
> view that (the possibility of) mind is enfolded in matter, is fatal
> for emergent powers materialism either. If you think it is, there's
> always the option of viewing the 'materialism' in SEPM as it perhaps
> was intended, viz., as having no necessary metaphysical implications,
> but rather invoking the Aristotelian notion of a 'material cause': the
> given, that from which the new emerges. Nor do I think it affects what
> Andy called 'the fundamental basis of realism', 'mind-independence'.
> When critical realists deploy this (problematical) notion, it doesn't
> mean that no mind, so to speak, has gone into the constitution of the
> object - in the case of social objects it ungainsayably has - rather
> that objects are existentially and/or causally intransitive with
> respect to our current efforts to understand them. Intransitivity,
> hence realism, applies whether the objects are 'ideal' (as in a
> theory) or 'material'.

This is interesting, though it does not speak to this point that 
'grapsing' cannot obviously be equated with 'identity'. 

Many thanks,

Andy



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